Results for Wandile Sihlobo

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Chocolate can certainly get one some brownie points, and no way is this truer than in Ivory Coast which in 2018 reported the largest agricultural trade balance in value terms in Africa, an amount of $5.1bn...

South Africa's food price inflation numbers continue to surprise us. The figures recently released by Statistics South Africa show that food price inflation remained unchanged in March 2019 at 2.3% for the third consecutive month...

The March 2019 World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report by the United States Department of Agriculture has provided further evidence that the world will have fairly large maize, soybean, and rice supplies in the 2018/19 season. Meanwhile, wheat production...

South African farmers planted 28,800 hectares of sorghum in the 2017/18 production season - the smallest area on record in a dataset starting from 1936/37. This is a disappointing picture, given that sorghum was once seen as key to the development of the biofuel industry in South Africa...

Subsequent to a decline from 54 to 48 points in the third quarter of 2018, the Agbiz/IDC Agribusiness Confidence Index weakened further to 42 in the last quarter of the year. This is the lowest point since the fourth quarter of 2009...

A recently published research paper by agricultural economists Jan Greyling and Philip Pardey in the Agrekon Journal brings home some key points about South Africa's maize production in terms of commercial and smallholder share contribution...

The United States Department of Agriculture has just released its World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, which covers most major grains and oilseeds estimates for the 2018/19 production season...

This week (ending 10 August 2018) there were no major data releases in the South African agricultural market. The weaker Rand against the US Dollar, coupled with higher Chicago grain prices provided support to the domestic grain and oilseed market...

With agriculture having its fair share of challenges, Wandile Sihlobo continues the discussion surrounding both domestic and regional developments with a closer look at agricultural trade performance...

Of late, a number of commentaries have surfaced arguing that the discussions about the proposed expropriation without compensation have not negatively affected investment in the agricultural sectors, suggesting that investment has actually increased over time...

Soya bean production remains at the heart of the US-China trade war, hence prices were under pressure on Friday (6 July 2018) on the back of the introduction of tariffs. For context, China is the world's largest soya bean consumer and heavily reliant on imports.

With the Agbiz/IDC Agribusiness Confidence Index results still above the neutral 50-point, although having declined marginally from 58 to 54 index points, the agribusiness sector remains optimistic about business conditions in South Africa...

Theo Boshoff, Agbiz head of legal intelligence, puts the issue of land expropriation without compensation into perspective and shares four possible future scenarios for land reform in SA if expropriation without compensation finds its way...

Although there are a number of factors driving sentiment of the other sub-indices, the unfavourable weather conditions in the Western Cape province and relatively lower global demand for maize exports...

SA could battle to offload some of its surplus white maize as major customers are also experiencing a production uptick. The country's maize oversupply has led to prices falling to their lowest levels since September 2014...

The least talked about story of the Eastern Cape is that it produces a third of SA's fresh milk and wool. The province is also a key producer of citrus, with new emerging farmers currently joining the industry...